Monthly Archives: January 2012

I was a bit bummed when I realised that I was missing The London Boat Show this month. I have such fond memories of it, you see, like the time I turned up in a faux fur coat with my friend, Kate, and we pretended to be a southern oil heiress and her PA, thus gaining entry to the super yachts, where we drank free champagne all afternoon with attentive, suntanned and much younger sales reps with names like ‘Guy’ and ‘Bertrand’. Good times…

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Aunt B told me that the Nashville Boat Show was scheduled for this very same weekend. Needless to say, I rushed on over there yesterday morning to check it out.

Now, to some extent, a boat show is a boat show is a boat show. Crowds of people wandering around looking at boats, and exhibitors trying to sell you things that relate even vaguely to nauticalia. Back in London, for example, my friends Tanya and Salty told me on Skype yesterday that they had gotten a really good deal there on a yacht rental in the Northern Aegean for their holiday this summer.

Meanwhile, back here in Nashville, I had a good chat with Gary Bachman and his lady wife, of the Hillbilly Delux guide service to striper fishing on Lake Cumberland, near Jamestown, Kentucky. [Settle down, Junior: it’s striperfishing, not stripper fishing.] I am definitely planning a girls’ day out on Lake Cumberland with these nice folks. Who needs the Mediterranean? It’s all fished out anyway.

But the biggest contrast between Nashville and London this weekend was in their respective star attractions. In London, the Show was opened by the notoriously spoilt heiress, Tamara Ecclestone. If you don’t know much about Tamara, just ask her beloved chihuaha, Duke.

In Nashville, on the other hand, our Boat Show featured Twiggy the Water Skiing Squirrel:

Actually, it turns out that there were two Twiggys at the Show, ‘Twiggy7’ and ‘Twiggy8’:

Followers of this blog in the UK are unlikely to know about Twiggy, who has been a celebrity since ‘Twiggy1’ got blown out of his nest during a hurricane in 1978, when he was just a baby. He had the good fortune to be rescued by Chuck and Lou Ann Best. I guess Chuck was kind of bored, because he decided to teach little Twiggy how to waterski. And the rest is history.

Back in England, of course, it is almost definitely illegal to teach a squirrel how to waterski and entertain thousands of delighted children:

I believe I may have mentioned already that I am helping mother clear out the house that she and Big Daddy have been living in for over fifty years. Yes, it is quite a job, but every day, we find new treasures, and I am enjoying the process in between bouts of tearing my hair out and taking tranquilizers.

When we got to my old bedroom and opened the closet, mom explained that she had saved my doll collection, and that I should be the one who decided what to do about it. They were all in shoe boxes, so I put them in a bag in the car, and waited until I got home to open them up and get a trip down memory lane. I just used to love those dolls.

OK, so the first one I opened was this:

I just want to say something before we go further into this post. First of all I have no memory of this doll. I know that doesn’t sound good. He was probably buried in the doll box and I only played with like, the Scarlett O’Hara doll. There is really nothing else I can say, without making it worse. Except…

Then I had this idea. Earlier on the same day, mother had pulled out her collection of old political badges. I mean, at least they are Democrats, right? So I did try to make it better:

After that, I decided to call Junior and Miss Pearl into the parlour to help me out, because before I knew what was happening, I had a major political incident on my hands. One by one, we pulled out the dolls and I applied the appropriate badges. Before long, we had a whole feminist liberationist Central America/Cesar Chavez thing going on:

Then it all got a bit silly. Junior offered to donate his Andy Warhol doll (after all, I am my mother’s daughter) to the tableau:

He then decided that these two looked kind of like a couple:

So there you go. Now I have what is perhaps the most politically incorrect mantlepiece on the planet. Or maybe the most politically correct? Who knows? At least I feel as though, in some strange way, I have empowered my dolls.

I belong to a couple of those websites where they send you special offers from local businesses. One in particular came in a couple of weeks ago that attracted my attention — a half-price one-day admission to a shooting range.

I especially appreciated the thoughtful way in which the promotion was worded:

“While it would certainly be convenient to use your backyard for target practice, recreational gunfire in subdivisions is typically frowned upon by the law-enforcement community. Maximize your marksmanship the neighborly way this season by taking aim at today’s deal…”

I am thinking that this might make the perfect present for a close friend whose birthday is coming up and needs all the help she can get. And it might be fun to spend a day at a target range. Miss Pearl is all for it. She shoots guns all the time, and has a lot of common sense. So I am thinking about it. After all, that’s what friends are for!